SCORING HIGH, PAYING UP, GATING IN: Middle‐class Formation and Asset Inequalities under Digital Capitalism in South Africa

This article examines how modern class dynamics become intertwined with automated classifications and data‐driven regimes of value creation under digital capitalism by demonstrating how housing markets shape asset inequalities and middle‐class formation in South Africa. Connecting institutional practices of mortgage lending with patterns of urban development and local market interactions, I illustrate how two market filters—affordability and creditworthiness—stratify home‐seekers into unequal market outcomes in terms of asset ownership and residential location. Both filters are shaped by automated classifications through the use of credit scores, turning consumer and property data into a new form of asset. Grounding my analysis in Blue Downs, a suburban area of Cape Town, I theorize the middle class as a ‘filtered class’, comprising asset‐deprived households that manifest their boundary work by accessing debt‐leveraged homeownership in gated estates. By scoring high, paying up and gating in, these households differentiate themselves from the urban poor and the elite, asserting their middle‐class status. Middle‐class formation results in the production of the ‘mortgaged periphery’—a segmented suburban landscape where physical fences and algorithmic barriers governing the production of and access to housing assets materialize class boundaries in terms of ownership, capital gains, aesthetics and property relationships.